Via Data Driven Journalism: ” A new project has developed an innovative means to approximate socioeconomic indicators by analyzing the network of international postal flows. The project used 14 million aggregated electronic postal records from 187 countries collected by the Universal Postal Union over a four-year period (2010-2014) to create an international network showing the way post flows around the world. In addition, the project builds upon previous research efforts using global flow networks, derived from the five following open data sources:

• World Trade Network available from the MIT Atlas Project
• Global Migration Network available from the Global Migration Project
• IP Traceroute Network available from the DIMES Project
• Digital Communications Network available from the Mesh of Civilizations Project
• Flight Network data available from ICAO

For each network, a country’s degree of connectivity for incoming and outgoing flows was quantified using the Jaccard coefficient and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient.
Although the highest Jaccard overlap was between the postal and trade networks, the rest of the networks did not strongly overlap in terms of edges.  Conversely, the Spearman rank correlation revealed that the volume of goods, people, and information flows are correlated, with the exception of the digital communications network, which was entirely uncorrelated with any other network…”